'Ambition used to be considered unfeminine’

As the BBC airs its rival to 'Mad Men’, Fay Weldon, Felicity Green and
Catherine Freeman recall their working lives in male-dominated offices in
the Fifties.

Bel (Romola Garai) and Freddie (Ben Whishaw) in The Hour, a drama about newspapers in the 1950s

By Paul Kendall, Charlotte Williamson and Matthew Holehouse

7:00AM BST 17 Jul 2011

Following the success of Mad Men, the hit American television series set in the glamorous, hard-drinking world of Sixties advertising agencies, this week the BBC unveils The Hour. Another period drama set in a bygone era, it also has a media industry, broadcasting, as a backdrop.

The action revolves around a bunch of smart executives working in a British television newsroom in the Fifties, a decade on the cusp of change.

But for all the social upheavals to come, it remained in the past, a time when bosses were almost exclusively male, a pretty secretary and an overflowing ashtray were considered office supplies, and a polite façade was all that covered the sexual tension.

Here, three women who began their working lives in the post-war years reveal the barriers they faced, the brickbats they had thrown at them as they rose through the ranks – often slowly – and a few unexpected perks of the job.

When I first went to work, in the mid-Fifties, I was a single mother, which was not the thing to be back then. I’d had my son, Nick, in 1954, shortly after completing a degree in economics, and had no option but to work to support him. So my mother looked after the child in our home in Saffron Walden and I commuted to London.

It is very difficult for anybody to understand how the basic expectations of the world were different from what they are today. The men regarded women as incompetent. You rarely put a woman in charge because men couldn’t stand being told what to do by their mother.

They wouldn’t even call them women; they would call them “girls”. They would say, “What a pretty dress you’re wearing, will you meet me in the office after work?” And that was sort of normal. The assumption was that if any woman was in the same room alone with a man, there would be instant sex.

And I hate to say it, but in those days girls were only too happy to be propositioned. The shock-horror with which a proposition is received these days means men are far less willing to do it, which seems a great loss to me.

Back then, the times were very much on the side of the man. Girls did sleep their way to the top, though it wasn’t really the top – and it was a very dangerous procedure because you could just as easily get fired as promoted. But being openly ambitious was considered unfeminine, and to be called unfeminine was the worst insult.

One of my first jobs was in Fleet Street, on a readers’ problems page. It was not a glamorous place. They put me on hire-purchase problems, because of my degree in economics and an assumption that I could understand one half of a legal document, which others couldn’t. But it was terribly boring.

I wore black or brown shoes, a long, demure skirt buttoned up to the neck and the wrists, with a mask of make-up and my hair “done”. One of the first pieces of advice I was given – by the woman who headed my department – was to make myself more attractive, by which I inferred she meant “sex yourself up a bit”, “flash a bit of leg”. I soon found out that she was having an affair with her boss, and there was a whole world of mistresses in the office.

As far as the men were concerned, women were there to be exploited. In fact, the only thing that kept men slightly respectable in the Fifties was the fact that there was no Pill. If a woman had a baby, a man would be held responsible and would probably have to marry her.

If, like me, you were already a single mother, you didn’t tend to talk about it. Not because you were ashamed, but because if you were a woman and working, you pretended you didn’t have a home. And when you were at home, you pretended that you didn’t have a job because it wasn’t approved of for a woman with a child to be working.

This meant that on the frequent occasions that I had to stay late in the office retyping my copy (this was in the days before Tipp-Ex, so if you made a mistake you had to do the whole thing again) I wouldn’t be able to say, “I’ve got a baby back home who needs me.”

Later, I worked in advertising. All the senior people would have hard spirits in their cupboards – just as they do in Mad Men. The secretaries would wash the glasses and, occasionally, be offered a glass themselves. These days, it’s young people you see drinking after work, but in the Fifties it was the older men who got the last train home.

Their wives would be looking forward to seeing them, after spending the whole day with the children, but the men didn’t particularly want to come home because their wives, who were so conventional and knew nothing about the world, seemed so boring.

What we have today is probably much better. It’s much more human. Your interests are looked after in a way that they weren't in the Fifties. If you went to someone and said you were interested in developing your career, they would have laughed at you.

Now in her mid-eighties, the influential fashion writer worked in newspaper offices from the mid-Fifties, and was the first woman on the board of a national title

I started out as a shorthand typist on Women and Beauty magazine before moving into newspapers. Around 1959, I went to the Daily Mirror as associate editor.

Someone said to me: “It’s not going to be easy because you will find yourself being senior to a lot of men who are probably older than you, and are certainly more experienced than you. They are not going to like finding themselves working for a woman. You will also have to give some of them a b------ing from time to time, but do it gracefully and always let him leave your room with his balls intact.” It was a very good piece of advice. If you want people to do want you want, make them think it was their idea.

Part of my remit was to inject the paper with a more “feminine” feel. In my first week there, the terribly nice features editor said: “I’ve been doing some special work for your pages, and I’ve worked up some nice borders with bows.” They were all being as helpfully “feminine” as they could, which was the last thing I wanted. My plan was to make the pages interesting to men, too.

Did I have any problems asserting my authority as a woman? Yes, probably, but I didn’t notice them too much. I remember, after I had been there four or five months, working with one of the male sub-editors who said to me, “You must be so grateful, all that hatred has disappeared.” And I said, “Hatred?” And he said, “You mean you didn’t notice it?” It must have died away. As long as you proved you could do your job – that you were willing to work as hard as anyone else, assume the same responsibilities, and generally do the job to the best of your ability – then you were respected.

The atmosphere was predominantly male, though, and that was compounded by the fact that the offices were awash with drink. All the senior executives had refrigerators in their offices, kept well-stocked by the chairman’s butler; all the doors were opened before lunch. Inevitably, the morning staff were too drunk to do the paper in the afternoon, so a whole new team would come in.

For someone like me, who didn’t come from a drinking family, I was horrified. I saw what was happening to too many women journalists who joined in with the boys, and it was not a pretty sight. Also, I didn’t think they were doing women journalists any favours. What really went to my heart – and head – was a girl reporter who didn’t turn up one day, or the second, and then was found dead in her bed. She had died of alcohol poisoning.

A glass of wine in the office was one thing, but Fleet Street pubs in the Sixties were quite another – crowded places where I always got pushed and shoved and hated getting my change in beer-soaked coins.

With all the drinking came the affairs. I can remember going to a reception in one of the big hotels up north. I had to go into the political editor’s bedroom to make a phone call. There, peeping from under his pillow, was a pale blue frilly nightie. I thought, “Funny pyjamas!” Apparently, everyone in the office knew about the affair except me. The girls involved in such affairs – secretaries, mostly – didn’t think of themselves as mistresses: they were girlfriends, and there is a difference. Mistresses expected more from married men.

There were not a great many married women in newspapers. If you had children – which I didn’t – unless you could afford help, or your mother could look after your children, you didn’t go back to work. There was no flexitime, no working four days a week.

When I was made a director of the group, in the mid-Sixties, I inherited a department where there were vertical streams of responsibility. Every head of a department was a man – and underneath him were all the extremely talented girls, in several cases much more talented than the men. I made it my business to promote these women. But within two years, every single one had left to have a family.

Naturally, there was a huge pay divide between men and women. And it didn’t die away with time. After I was made a director, I was on the board for five years and then a new director was appointed. I discovered, quite by accident, that he had been appointed at exactly twice the salary I was earning. So I left. Everyone was astonished. Apparently, I was supposed to be honoured simply to be a director.

I didn’t know Grace Wyndham Goldie, [a pioneer of British television and an inspiration for one of the main female characters in The Hour], but of course I knew of her. She wasn’t an icon for working women at the time – women in those days simply didn’t think like that. She was a rarefied creature, not one of the girls. I don’t know her social background but I think anyone with a double-barrelled name had a head start. There wasn’t a great deal of camaraderie between women from one social group and the next.

Feminism came in and it was rough stuff. Nobody burned their bras, but it made for a good headline. The movement rode the crest of the wave and achieved far less than it had hoped. What is so interesting now is that there is a second wave coming, spearheaded by women with the ability to lead the way through the all-male jungles that still exist.

But we won’t take over the world. I’m not defeatist, but realistic. We make progress, of course we make progress, but then we let each other down because we’re not all thinking alike: we’re not all working women, and we don’t all want to be working women – a lot of us want to get married and have children. So it’s three steps forward and two steps back.

CATHERINE FREEMAN

The 79-year-old Oxford graduate became, in 1956, the first female producer of 'Panorama’

People think the Fifties were a very difficult time for a woman in the workplace, and you had to be very ambitious; but it wasn’t the case at all. For me, it was a rather carefree time. There weren’t very many women on the Panorama team, except for the secretaries, but it was very democratic and collegiate.

It was really the first decade of TV and very experimental; we made it up as we went along. Everybody was equal – men and women, producers and technicians. There was no hierarchy. A young David Attenborough was in my department, and Malcolm Muggeridge and Woodrow Wyatt contributed.

There were four of us on Panorama, including Michael Peacock, who was 26 when he edited Panorama and who would become the first controller of BBC Two; Charles Wheeler, the foreign correspondent whom I would later marry; and David Wheeler, who was involved in the very first broadcasts from Alexandra Palace.

Grace Wyndham Goldie was then the assistant head of the Talks department. She was extremely powerful and effective. She was twice the man that the men were. During the 1955 election, I worked 18 hours a day for her, and I think she saw something of herself in me.

At that time, Britain was still emerging from an atmosphere of war. Rationing had just ended. It was shabby and quite austere. At work, the men smoked like chimneys, but it was certainly not like Mad Men, where the men are rampant and the girls are like Jessica Rabbit. There was a very good pub we went to near Lime Grove, the Shepherd’s Bush studio where Panorama was filmed when it began in 1952, called the British Prince, but there were never any cocktail receptions such as the ones depicted in Mad Men or The Hour.

Panorama was a very soft programme before 1956, the year of Suez and the Hungarian uprising – an amazing series of fantastic events. It became harder and much more businesslike under Grace Wyndham Goldie.

I would direct the show, and I remember Leonard Miall, the head of the Talks department, showing people round the studio during a live broadcast while we were lined up in the gallery. “They are like fighter pilots,” he said, which amused me. As it was done live, you had to keep your nerve.

The only time I got in trouble was when a camera took a shot from behind Richard Dimbleby, revealing his bald spot. He was quite cross, but people should be allowed a little vanity.

Sometimes during the broadcast I would get carried away. I was asked not to swear so much, as I was upsetting the rather austere men in the engineering department who monitored the output.

During the Hungarian uprising, Richard Dimbleby was on the border, but the dish in the Alps was facing the wrong way so we had to send a man up on a bicycle to correct it. With no one to open the show, I had to get a sports presenter from the BBC bar to ad-lib. We reconnected with Richard three minutes before the end of the show.

I returned to television with Thames from 1976 to 2001, as a controller. It was so much more corporate and competitive. There was much more sexism and harassment by bullying men, and there were nothing like the opportunities for young women to be running a show so quickly. The Fifties really were a lucky time.